Moore's Law Dead by 2022, Expert Says

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Moore's Law -- the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years -- will come to an end as soon as 2020 at the 7nm node, said a keynoter at the Hot Chips conference here.

While many have predicted the end of Moore's Law, few have done it so passionately or convincingly. The predictions are increasing as lithography advances stall and process technology approaches atomic limits.

"For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call it dead," said Robert Colwell, who seeks follow-on technologies as director of the microsystems group at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it's a big deal," said the engineer who once managed a Pentium-class processor design at Intel.

Moore's Law was a rare exponential growth factor that over 30 years brought speed boosts from 1 MHz to 5 GHz, a 3,500-fold increase. By contrast, the best advances in clever architectures delivered about 50x increases over the same period, he said.

Exponentials always come to an end by the very nature of their unsustainably heady growth. Unfortunately, such rides are rare, Colwell said.

"I don't expect to see another 3,500x increase in electronics -- maybe 50x in the next 30 years," he said. Unfortunately, "I don't think the world's going to give us a lot of extra money for 10 percent [annual] benefit increases," he told an audience of processor designers.

Colwell poured cold water on blind faith that engineers will find another exponential growth curve to replace Moore's Law. "We will make a bunch of incremental tweaks, but you can't fix the loss of an exponential," he said.

DARPA tracks a list of as many as 30 possible alternatives to the CMOS technology that has been the workhorse of Moore's Law. "My personal take is there are two or three promising ones and they are not very promising," he said.

DARPA's microsystems group has "a fair amount of money chasing" two programs. One is exploring approximate computing in a program called Upside; another is exploring the effects of spin-torque oscillators to settle on partial solutions at relatively low power.

Colwell ticked off a list of other routes to improving chips post-CMOS, including 3D stacking, new architectures and apps, new switching technologies, better human interfaces, and just plain creative marketing. "You laugh, but you will see this," he said, citing Intel's dolls of fab workers.

Colwell called out a few specifics, such as work building devices at the level of a hundred to a thousand atoms. In addition, "there's a lot of work in brain-machine interfacing -- people who figure out better interfaces will win," he said.

As the end approaches, "when Moore's Law stops it will be economics that stops it, not physics, so keep your eye on the money," he said.

That said, new opportunities will emerge to nudge chips forward, so engineers need to "keep designing our heads off, but at the same time plan for the future because it's not that far off," he said.

There seems still some way to go in terms of nm transistor size, and already we are expanding into 3 dimensions. Have the esperts taken this into account? My feeling is the 3D expansion will carry us a fair bit further. Could someone who knows more than I do (which is not much) comment?

Was n't it you yourself who reported a couple of weeks back on Samsung's 3D NAND -- stacked one cell on top of another on a single wafer ?

With time, such 3D technology will spread into processors and memory - processor combos as well. Though the cost per transistor may increase in such stacked devices due to cost of addition of isolation & vertical interconnects etc., the cost per system & power consumption would go down radically due to electrical reasons. How is that for not having to wait for adequate throughput from EUV but still stay on the growth path ?

Balanced, comprehensive and well-reasoned coverage is what we will keep depending on you for.

@ Garcia - Lasheras : selective presentation of data ( graph showing saturation of clock rate ) only damages one's own credibility. As it should have been clear to you this is a Technical Forum and participants are well aware of clock - rate vs multi - processor arguments as options to deliver a certain GFlops. That train has long left the station.

"As it should have been clear to you this is a Technical Forum and participants are well aware of clock - rate vs multi - processor arguments as options to deliver a certain GFlops"

I'm pretty aware of this, but not everybody share the same skills or knowledge. The graph is included in a blog that I wrote for the All Programmable Planet community, in which I tried to give a very simple physical explanation about why clock rates doesn't fit with Moore's law beyond a process limit despite the fact that transistor number does. If you are really interested, here you have the full history.

The "selective presentation of data" I expose was obtained & kindly shared by Dr. Colin Gillespie, from the Univerity of Newcastle -- UK. In his original blog, he explains how he collected and analyzed the raw data -- you can check it in deeper way if you want to.

"That train has long left the station"

I started working in the clock related problems in CMOS processes in year 2001.

From your comments, I deduce you are pretty interested in the Moore's Law demise or survival topic. I plan to be in the related EETimes week in review chat tomorrow... maybe shall I see you there?

Indeed the economic stop seems to be a far more predicatable one than the technological stop. Not only will very few players be able to afford to build a fab or even tape out an IC in 7 nm or 5 nm or whatever the last CMOS node is, but it is also likely that very few ICs will command the enormous volumes required to justify the expense of developing them and getting them released to production.

@rick merritt >> Regarding graphene (along with many other nano-particles) and toxicity at the human cell-level has been raised in the past few months (please google it and you may find the topic interesting). I also have issues with the "fact" that the only byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells is supposed to be water. Donald Rumsfeld 'poetry' regarding the Knowns and the Unknowns may hold true here (please google it and you may find that interesting also). Cheers